The Mississippifarian

Thanks to Kay for reminding me that it’s Syttende Mai: THE GREATEST NATIONAL DAY OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE WORLD!

Yeah, yeah, the Fourth of July is cool too, but seriously, how can throwing British tea into Boston Harbor compare with shrugging off the shackles of Swedish oppression?

picture of a Swedish banker
(courtesy of the Royal Norwegian archives)

Ah, but the French Revolution — now there was an independence day!

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BarbinMD has the details.

All my best to the Senator and his family.

I’m really happy for all my gay friends, but personal bottom line? This is going to cost me a fortune in wedding presents. 

Patt Morrison, on California’s recently-overturned same-sex marriage ban

Basic human rights are so inconvenient that way. I don’t go to weddings, straight or otherwise. If you love someone, why chain yourself to them legally? Marriage isn’t a commitment anymore, it’s a Penn & Teller act where the wife and hubby publicly proclaim they’ll never ever split up, move on or in any other way get a life as a minister spot welds the final link on their matrimonial chains.

Shacking up is soooo much simpler. Besides, kids love knowing their siblings have different last names, further proving how unalike they are. Oh yeah — we may have the same DNA but at least I’m a Smith and not a Johnson!!!

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OK, now that I’ve seen this poster, I’m sold.

More on this graphic path to enlightment here. Frankly, I don’t see the Mao thing at all. This poster has Eva Peron written all over it  — how many parallels can you count, boys and girls?

And no, I don’t think Peronista comparisons are unflattering. Except maybe to the memory of Evita.

No, I don’t plan on changing the name of the blog to the Hillaryfarian, although I would grow some Obamalocks (if I had the hair). Barackafari does have a certain rhythm to it, however. Definitely better than being a Rodhamite.

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Funny how no one ever thinks about making trucks more fuel efficient when the price of gas is low. 

Seriously, it’s very funny. Why exactly does Detroit refuse to pay attention to mileage? Has anyone ever done a check to see how many directors serve on boards of auto manufacturers and oil companies?

It doesn’t take much of an effort to improve on five miles to the gallon.

—’—

Will Elder, R.I.P.

I wasn’t allowed to read Mad magazine when I was a little kid, and yes, that made me enjoy it all the more. And yes, I did have a crush on Little Annie Fannie for a while in the late ’60s/early ’70s.

Nothing too serious. A couple of fan letters, one proposal of marriage, and lots and lots of Kleenex. In retrospect, I’m not sure what I saw in her. Blondes really aren’t my type.

—’—

Yesterday’s left over links:

Anna Pratt on the Postville INS raid (or why it takes a village of Jews to hire a packing plant full of undocumented workers) [more]

The wingbat dingoes wasted no telling lies about gay marriage in California, starting with baseless smears of the judges (I’ve come to the conclusion that only fags and sissy boys oppose gay marriage — real men could care less what you do with your private parts)

USS Maine explodes in Venezuelan highlands: Hearst chain dispatches war correspondents

Digby on change

Gawker v. Minnesota (a Franken cheapshot)

Hagee says Jews have dead souls

Pretend they’re fresh. It’s not like you’re keeping up either. And no, being Jewish has nothing to do with undocumented workers, but I’ll stir that pot in whatever way it takes to get people to notice what’s going on.

Kosher meat products aren’t competitively priced. Kosher means a premium price and their customers pay it. There is no shortage of highly qualified, healthy workers in Iowa. Workers who already know the meat business. Workers ready to be hired. The only thing Iowa is short of is workers stupid enough to work for peanuts with lousy health benefits and lines that run just as fast as the ones controlled by the Christian pigs at Iowa Beef Packers.

When it comes to exploiting workers, all religions are enablers, if not the actual employer of record.

Kosher only applies to the animals, not the workers.

In their usual weasel-like fashion, the Bushies waited until late Friday to announce it, but veteran vote suppressor and racist POS Hans von Spakovsky has withdrawn his name as an FEC nominee.

You can’t really compare him with Rummy or Wolfie as von Spakovsky’s idiocy never killed anyone, but he was the worst of the second tier, and if this were the end of WWII, he’d be looking at a rope for sure.

In a democracy, no crime is worse than that of knowingly suppressing the vote. McJoan has more, likewise dday.

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And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:7

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Sonia Morphew Pitt makes the news again. Most people, after getting publicly exposed as a “do nothing,” “take lots of trips” waste of a government salary, would have dropped the arbitration, but not Pitt.

I guess she needs the money or something. Frankly, I can’t imagine any Minnesota employer wanting to hire someone so notorious for not doing their job, and padding their expense account while they were at it.

Heckuva a job, Sonia. I’m sure there are lots of other people who were supportive of your right to “phone it in.”

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How urgent is someone’s death wish when he jumps into an industrial wood chipper?

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We’re building a new prison in Afghanistan, because we’re not nearly done yet with fucking with those people.

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Hillary’s finally ramping it down. Over at the Times, they have side by side maps showing just how Republican her greatest area of support was. (That and among middle aged women and art critics.)

It wasn’t just Rush, for over a year Fox News dampened down their criticism of Clinton. Of all the Democrats, she made the hard right less nervous. Obama? Shit, he might end the war or do something else crazy . . . .

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iKickass.

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Josh Marshall on why online journalism is just getting started.

Jazz from artists not listed in the New Yorker’s Top 100.

Thirteen songs, almost two hours of music.

The endorsement also drew a rebuke from Emily’s List, which endorses only women who support abortion rights and which has endorsed Mrs. Clinton. Ellen R. Malcolm, the president, said in a statement that it was “tremendously disrespectful” of Naral not to give Mrs. Clinton “the courtesy to finish the final three weeks of the primary process.”

NYTimes

Maybe, if Emily’s List hadn’t kept their belief that Clinton has lost such a secret, NARAL wouldn’t have felt obliged to endorse Obama.

Just sayin’. 

—o—

Toles reminds us that the Republicans have much worse problems than this business of how HRC makes her exit.

—o—

Big Tent Democrat, formerly known as Armando, is still going through the grieving process. I think he’s got a few more steps to go before lucidity intervenes.

—o—

Sorry guys, but if you want to keep your bloody little fucked up war/occupation going, you’re going to have to vote to pay for it yourselves.

—o—

A follow up look at the Texas family Swiftboaters.

—o—

Bob Novak, lying to us for 45 years now.

—o—

When a Pulitzer Prize winner signs a petition calling for a newspaper columnist to be fired, the national media takes notice.

But not to the point of anyone actually running a news item about it in a dead tree publication. No, that turf belongs to our corporate masters, and they don’t have any problems with Kersten’s political or cultural illiteracy.

I’m not qualified to be a dead tree columnist either, but if I ever fell into such a position, I’d bust my butt to learn the ropes. There is absolutely no reason — based on her work product — to think that Katherine Kersten has ever cracked open any books about basic journalism. Her column continues to read like it has from day one, as a receptacle for unbalanced polemics, political payback and hatchetry.

UPDATE: Just dandy. Now the meatheads on the right are launching their own petition drives, predictably going after Nick Coleman. And, being wingnuts, they each have to make their own little speech, like this jackass writing as David Hanners, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who most certainly did not sign the Coleman petition.

2:45 pm PDT, May 15, David Hanners, Minnesota

As a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, I have to say, Nick Coleman writes like a toddler after sniffing a hardwood floor cleaning chemical. The man strings together sentences that make sense only to a select few people suffering from a combination of explosive diarrhea and paranoid schizophrenia. Coleman’s not so much a journalist as he is a hemorrhoid that has inexplicably developed the ability to type.

Because that’s exactly how Pulitzer Prizing winning reporters write. (In crayon, during recess.)

UPDATE: More gas for the fire from E&P. If Kersten were an actual reporter, she’d be mortified. As it is, I’m not sure she even knows what E&P does, or who Jim Romenesko is.

—o—

Because speaking the truth is such a Klannish thing to do. Bill O’Reilly isn’t the worst person in the world, just a tired flack with a head full of bile.

—o—

Demko has more on Stephanie Shriock. Interesting analysis, and way more insightful than the crap I’ve seen coming from our dead tree folks.

Needless to say, I’m thrilled that Chuck Schumer’s getting a second butt buddy from Minnesota to carry Wall Street’s water in the coming new Congress.

Just because Schumer’s a Democrat doesn’t mean he’s not the enemy. Nothing New York does benefits the Midwest; Wall Street is a carrion eater, and they love the taste of our farms and small towns.

Wow. NPR just barely managed to mention the Iraq appropriations bill’s defeat in the House before jumping on the California Supreme Court striking down anti-gay marriage laws in that state.

I’ve never quite figured out how I am personally impacted by what you do with your sex organs. If my dick’s not involved, I really do fail to see why it’s any of my business. If it feels good to you and all parties consent to whatever it is you’re doing, go for it. 

Now the radio’s back to the business of fundraising for MPR, which, after all, is what public radio is all about: semi-affluent listeners underwriting the cost of delivering pro-establishment news targeted to the truly affluent. Without your help, Bill Kling can’t keep making half a million dollars a year for having had the genius to privatize public radio in Minnesota.

Bill Kling was Maggie Thatcher long before anyone had heard of Maggie Thatcher. Bill Kling was remixing NPR feeds until NPR restructured their entire feed system to put a stop to local public radio networks slicing and dicing their product. Bill Kling also runs MPR-affiliated for-profit businesses, helping to make him the highest paid head of a non-profit organization in Minnesota.

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Take the 2008 Ask A Working Woman Survey. Unless, of course, you don’t qualify.

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Jane Hamsher says they’re doing an end around, but the upshot is that yes, Obama’s going to help pay off HRC’s campaign debt. 

Even though HRC paid her ridiculously overpaid consultants in full, stiffing local printing outfits and landlords in almost every state she campaigned in.

Even though HRC ran the most negative, disparaging campaign of any our of candidates, Mike Gravel included.

Even though we need that money to win this fall.

Just because HRC said give me money or I’ll keep beating you up. It’s time to get real and admit to ourselves that in this race Hillary’s been the traditional male (loutish, drunk and demanding), while Barack’s been the perfect lady (polite, deferential, willing to compromise, etc.).

—~—

Al finally hires a campaign manager. 

All that money and he didn’t have one? The phrase penny wise, pound foolish springs to mind.

—~—

A Pulitzer Prize winner has signed the “fire Katherine Kersten” petition.

Ken Silverstein has more about “that” video. Not to mention a post on HRC’s own private Tony Rezko. (Throw in Norman Hsu, and that’s a lot of questionable money she raised.)  

Silverstein also reports that a US security contractor has been spying on the US on behalf of Kazahkstan, but it’s OK because most of the principals are FBI and CIA retirees.

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Voter suppression taken to a new low by people you would have thought hit bottom a long time ago.

A real Supreme Court would stop this shit instead of leaning back on their thrones to applaud.

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Joe “Bronze Star” Galloway weighs in on the Pentagon’s propaganda program. Gratifyingly frank, and devastatingly detailed. And now we learn that the VA aggressively discouraged staff from diagnosing PTSD. Not only did the Pentagon weave a network of lies in support of this demented war/occupation, but they’ve instructed medical professionals to commit malpractice for bottom line purposes.

More on media types going along to get along from Romenesko.

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Republican office holders can no longer count on anyone to help save them from their heinous crimes against the American people.

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If you love me, sign this petition. If you have a blog, help distribute this link.

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Via Mediation, add traditional branding to the list of things the internet is destroying. And add edgeconomy to your list of vocabulary words to study. And kudos to Taylor for finding this great link to reviews of a book on Postville, Iowa, home to undocumented worker hiring Lubavtichers.

One of the local media pundit games is making fun of the dead tree publications while trying to make a horse race out of the competition between the new online news groups. But all news consumers really want is good reporting.

Whatever you may think of the new City Pages crew, if you love medical mystery shows, you have to read Beth Walton’s Mystery illness fells young man. A great read filled with horror stories of hospital politics and doctors who fear litigation more than the death of a patient. Even at the Mayo Clinic.

Anyone who thinks our medical system still works, has probably never put it to the test. It’s not about making people better, it’s about managing a very large business and not getting sued in the process.

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Just got an automated call from Merchant Circle, a Citysearch venture. I’m pretty sure my client never signed up for this program, and because I’m the contact person I get automated calls on the infrequent occasions when someone tries to hook up with them. 

Note to Citysearch: successful businesses have no reason to partner with strangers. Your recommendation is worthless because you are whores who are only interested in money. 

A radical step, but I just let Citysearch know that if they can’t stop the calls and remove my client from their new program, her business will stop advertising with Citysearch altogether. 

I’m stunned by this development, but of all the industries in this country, the marketing folks appear to have become one of the most clueless of the lot. Watching the game last night I saw Yellowbook graphics on screen that are at least five years from representing available search technology. Worse, the “yellow pages” books have been the worst adapters of internet technology. Google eats their lunch (breakfast, dinner and snacks) daily. Google gives you information, Yellow Pages sites just tell you who paid for a listing.

If you are promoting a business, don’t use Yellow Pages or newspaper advertising unless you’re very confident you know what you’re doing. And, if you use Yellow Pages, frankly, I don’t think you have a clue. Ask someone under 30 when the last time they used the Yellow Pages was (hard copy or online). I’m betting some of the people you talk to won’t even know what Yellow Pages are.

Ditto all the online networking crap. Please do not contact me regarding any social networking group you’re involved in. I suckered for some early on, and now I have a Facebook account for life because it would take me at least half a day to even try to unconnect from those unscrupulous, lying, database-abusing fucknuts.

UPDATE: A partial victory. Citysearch just called me and Merchant Circle is only listed as their partner because that was part of Citysearch’s strategy for containing Merchant Circle and stopping them from making robo calls. As it turns out, the calls I’ve been receiving were for me, and not the restaurant. And by me, I mean my all but defunct writing business. It seems clear now that the only villain in this piece is Merchant Circle, an odious, vile, robo-calling bunch of predatory pricks with a worthless business model but enough venture capital that they now brag of having automatically called and harassed every business in the USA four times already.

Merchant Circle is a cancer afflicting online marketing, run by tools on behalf of fucktards. Fuck Merchant Circle and all the despicable shits who work for them.

*~*

Danny Ainge was named Top NBA Exec yesterday. It’s not a category they keep stats for, but Kevin McHale should have gotten an assist (which, on the Wolves books would be recorded as a turnover).

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You can think like a Republican and figure that 50,000 Chinese are just a drop in the bucket, or you can be staggered by this enormous loss of human life. They just suffered almost as many deaths in day as we did during the entire Vietnam conflict.

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Is it just my imagination, or are all the people harping about HRC’s gender her supporters? Obviously, they’re the only ones making detailed lists of the gender offenses against Clinton (failing consistently to distinguish between “our” jokes and Republican attack merchandise).

Plenty of ugly crap has been circulated about Obama, but his camp wisely ignores most of it. They certainly don’t sit around making lists of offenses against the candidate. Winners rarely do.

My increasing (by the day) dislike of Hillary Rodham Clinton stems not from her gender, but from her actions. Actions that remind me strongly of her goatish husband and his Darwinesque Rubinomics that helped ensure the new century would be all about transferring wealth from workers to Wall Street. That and the little matter of the fact that SHE VOTED FOR BUSH’S WAR. That alone disqualified her in my book. Edwards at least apologized. This Clinton will never apologize, anymore than her bent-dick hubby ever did. They are both far too selfish to ever admit fault.

Also, as a writer, I’d like to ask that the phrase “slouches toward” be permanently banned. That or you should have to make a payment upfront to Joan Didion. (C’mon, the major riff on her famous essay title was in ‘96!)

Oh, and here’s that Hitler video again. Don’t like it? Eat it. You would have never have seen anything like this if Clinton had known when to quit. Poor losers are routinely mocked by our society. Being a girl has nothing to do with it. I’ll keep putting up links to it until the Clintons call it quits. 

And yes, she has every right to keep running. What she doesn’t have is the right to criticize the presumptive nominee. Yes, she’s been better lately, but I have no doubt that more damage is coming because she’s not running a Huckabee-just-in-case campaign. She’s running for all she’s worth, and what the hell is that about?

Over means over, and this one is done. Losing isn’t easy, but refusing to admit defeat just makes it worse.

That and the creators of Hillary’s Downfall deserve a Pulitzer.

[Just to be "fair," here's another video calling Obama a Hitler. Lots of laffs to be sure  — not. The Hillary video, whatever you think of it, is funny. Barack Obama is the Next Adolf Hitler is pure propaganda. Watch it to the very end, it's not a joke, and it's all done on HRC's behalf. Ugly, ugly stuff with loads of misspellings and tons of factual errors. To be very fair, I have to wonder if it's not an outsourced RNC project done just to exacerbate the conflicts in the Democratic party. "GavinVox68" is either a Limbaugh stooge, or just some gutter slime. Either way, he did put together a totally objectionable video with no redeeming qualities, layers of horseshit and lies, and a complete disrespect for the presumptive nominee. (Not unsurprising since his second choice is the racist Ron Paul.)]

Yes, I was a little cranky last night. Even going to a friend’s place to watch Cleveland-Boston didn’t do much to cheer me up (that was while all you busy beavers were leaving messages last night). This morning, after semi-successfully hacking the pollengelatinous gunk and chunks out of my throat, I ran around delivering checks to vendors because nothing spells success like being too busy to pay your bills. And just now I got an eyeful of sun courtesy of the back window of a car driving by and am typing with a big purple spot the size of an NFL hematoma blurring my vision.

Just so you know it’s not all Hillary.

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It’s more than a little amazing how much you can slow down criminal investigations when you control the DOJ. The open and shut voter suppression case from the New Hampshire GOTV phone jamming case is still dragging on.

They hauled Allen Raymond in front of Congress yesterday. 

Rep. Paul Hodes, a New Hampshire Democrat, urged his colleagues to focus on key “unanswered questions” about whether the White House played a role in the plot and whether the Justice Department dragged its feet on the case for political reasons.

“We need to know whether others were involved in the election interference, whether they attempted to cover up the involvement of other political operatives, and whether there was a concerted effort to delay prosecution,” Hodes said.

Hodes said the public deserves to know whether political interference delayed prosecution of the case until after the 2004 elections and Bush’s re-election.

Republicans fumed at the charges. Rep. Chris Cannon, a Republican from Utah, suggested Democrats were recycling a 6-year-old case to score political points against the GOP in an election year.

“These cases are old news,” Cannon said.

The phone-jamming scandal has led to at least three criminal prosecutions and a lawsuit that was settled with Republicans paying the Democrats $135,000.

More than 800 hang-up calls jammed get-out-the-vote phone lines set up by the state Democratic Party and the Manchester firefighters union for more than an hour on Election Day, when Republican John Sununu won a Senate race against then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat. Because Sununu won by nearly 20,000 votes, the more than 800 jammed phone calls probably had little effect on the outcome of the race.

Charles McGee, former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, pleaded guilty and served seven months in prison for his role in the scheme.

Former RNC regional director James Tobin of Maine was convicted by a jury in 2005 of helping arrange the phone-jamming calls. He was acquitted this year on appeal; federal prosecutors are appealing. 

 

Phone records from Tobin’s trial show he made two dozen calls to the White House political office right about Election Day 2002, as the phone-jamming operation was finalized, carried out and abruptly shut down.

The White House political office, recipient of most of the calls, was run in 2002 by Ken Mehlman. He has denied any calls were related to the jamming, contending the discussions focused only on the close election won by Sununu. 

 

Concord Monitor

In 2009, the new Congress needs to immediately pass legislation removing the statute of limitations for all crimes buried by Bush’s DOJ. Re-election doesn’t mean all your crimes are absolved, and there are clearly more unindicted felons associated with this case than felons who’ve served time.

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Sara Robinson writes on ten theories about change. My take isn’t that the problem is with change, so much as the subversion of change by the rich and powerful. Look at Microsoft. By now I would hope that most people are computer friendly enough to recognize that personal computing has been moving forward with the handbrake on thanks to Microsoft’s buggy and virulently unsafe platforms. 

Barack Obama could increase national safety and decrease long-term administrative costs simply by switching the government over to Macintosh computers. Stronger regulatory functions could stop greedy CEOs from underpaying workers who contribute most to productivity (hint: that would be no one in accounting or upper management). Patent and copyright reform could put an end to corporate exploitation of others’ creativity, while opening the door to further innovation and technological advances. 

The time is right for a big thinker, and that’s Barack Obama. Does even the most die-hard HRC supporter think that she would ever do anything to loosen the death grip the wealthy have on how things are done in this country?

The future belongs to the young, and right now most of the young have zero incentive to educate and better themselves, having seen how that worked out for their parents, most of whom have worked themselves half to death without getting ahead, and who are facing retirement without any assurances of home ownership or proper medical care.

Change is mandatory, but this time it needs to be real change, not Bush league bullshit.

~*~

CBS is buying CNET for $1.8 billion. The old media is truly more clueless than anyone imagined. Then again, in real, pre-Bush dollars, that’s way less than a billion.

I feel sorry for anyone whose pension money is invested in a fund that holds a lot of CBS stock. (And I feel worse for dollar hoarders in general.)

More proof that the wealthy are putting their dollars into tangible assets as fast as they can.

This painting selling for $86.3 million is all the proof I need that the dollar isn’t worth much anymore. Think of what you could buy with $86 million, then look at this painting again. One hundred years from now there will be hundreds of Bacon’s contemporaries whose work will be more highly prized. This is the work of desperate people who have all the money, but know the value of nothing. To say that this painting is worth more than a nice house is stretching it. To say it’s worth more than 500 homes is, on the face of it, absurd.

~*~

 

The Republican National Committee yesterday attacked Barack Obama for promising to stop federal raids against clinics that dispense medical marijuana in states where it has been legalized. (I reported his promise yesterday.) Danny Diaz, the R.N.C. communications director, released this statement:

“Barack Obama’s pledge to stop Executive agencies from implementing laws passed by Congress raises serious doubts about his understanding of what the job of the President of the United States actually is. His refusal to enforce the law reveals that Barack Obama doesn’t have the experience necessary to do the job of President, or that he fundamentally lacks the judgment to carry out the most basic functions of the Executive Branch. What other laws would Barack Obama direct federal agents not to enforce?”

Bruce Mirken, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, which supports legalizing medical marijuana, said the R.N.C. statement “ignores a few salient points, such as the fact that last year 15 Republicans voted last year for the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment to cut off funding for Justice Department medical marijuana raids, including such flaming liberals as Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Dana Rohrabacher of California, a former Reagan staffer.”

John McCain has echoed the Bush administration’s line that there’s no evidence of marijuana’s efficacy for pain relief, but several recent studies have concluded otherwise. 

John Tierney

 

A little too little too late. Medical marijuana was the compromise. Since the Republicans chose to continue playing hardball, the new position should be legalization, and immediate full pardons for everyone in jail or prison with only marijuana-related offenses on their record.

Bankers who swindled billions from hard working Americans are getting golden parachutes, but we still lock up working people whose only crime was to try to forget about what a shithole country the Republicans have turned America into.